When the Denver Art Museum was campaigning for passage of a $62.5 million bond issue to fund its much-trumpeted expansion, it pledged that the added space would allow visitors to view significant parts of the collection previously in storage.

One area where that promise has been fulfilled is the institution’s Herbert Bayer Collection and Archive. With more than 8,000 objects covering virtually all aspects of the one-time Aspen resident’s diverse output, it offers the world’s most comprehensive look at the famed artist and designer.

While scholars have long appreciated this 27-year-old holding, it has been nearly unknown to the general public because little of it has been exhibited until now.

A lobby area and corridor outside a boardroom and auditorium in the lower level of the museum’s Hamilton Building have been designated as a permanent gallery for rotating Bayer selections.

The first permutation, chosen by Gwen Chanzit, curator of the collection and archive, consists of 45 selections spanning much of the artist’s career, including photographs, paintings, preparatory drawings and sculptural maquettes.

The maquettes and many of the paintings will remain on view indefinitely, but because of sensitivity to light, works on paper will be rotated every six months, regularly providing visitors something new to see and revealing additional facets of the Bayer holding.

Because of its out-of-the way location and irregular shape, the gallery is not the ideal space for these or any other artworks. It also doesn’t help that a few of the pieces are inside the boardroom and an entryway to the auditorium – spaces that are sometimes locked and inaccessible.

But it has to be said that the small maquettes, such as the 7-inch-tall “Circular Stairs 1968/77,” look terrific in the two display cases built into walls, and Bayer’s often geometric imagery interacts well with the jutting, assertive angles of Daniel Libeskind’s architecture.

Although the multifaceted modernist lived all over the world, he spent nearly 30 years in Aspen beginning in 1946 and developed an intimate kinship with the state, which reminded him of his native Austria.

After apprenticeships under two architects, Bayer enrolled in 1921 at the now-

famous Bauhaus, an integrated art and design school founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. It moved twice, finally settling in Berlin before the Nazis closed the facility in 1933.

Bayer left the Bauhaus in 1928 to pursue a design career in Berlin, where he remained for a decade. During this time, he devoted a significant period of time to exploring the artistic possibilities of photography, using photomontage and other unorthodox techniques.

More than a dozen of his images from this period are on view, ranging from his famous surrealist self-portrait from 1932, in which he appears to have a mannequin’s body, to less widely known examples such as “Legs in Sand” (1928), a tight composition showing a woman’s legs on a beach.

In this display, Chanzit has tried and mostly succeeded in offering at least glimpses of the staggering diversity of media in which Bayer worked and in showing the thematic and stylistic threads running through his work.

On one wall, for example, she has paired his photomontage, “Lonely Metropolitan” (1932), in which a pair of eyes peers at the viewer from the palms of disembodied hands, with a circa-1941 brochure for his design studio that reuses the hands in an entirely different context.

If Bayer is probably most widely recognized for his design work and photography, he was also a formidable painter, an aspect of his work that continues to be undervalued by the broader art world.

Driving home that point is “Interstellar Exchange 194 1/2,” an eye-grabbing, semi-abstract painting that manages to combine scientific allusions with surrealist overtones in a highly colorful, kinetic composition.

Few if any artists with Colorado ties have earned a larger place in art history than Bayer, and a gallery devoted to the museum’s ample collection of his work has been long overdue.

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.